My local school which is rural, has shop classes too. They tried doing away with them and turned the class rooms into something for the music and theater department. Then enough parents complained that they built an 72' X 120' building for shop. There is an automotive section complete with lift, wood working, and welding. The four welder receptacles they had weren't enough, I was hired to add eight more, which is overkill. The schools in the city, my sister in law has been a teacher in one for 22 years, did away with shop classes because there wasn't enough interest. I have a cousin that teaches somewhere in PA, same thing. My brother has a friend I've never met that used to be a shop teacher somewhere around Minneapolis, he was given the option to teach something else or retire when shop was eliminated. He's now a cop.
Good for him. The stupid example given about shoveling horse **** for $3 per stall equates to about $18 to $21 per hour if the kid wants to move. If he or she wants to feel sorry for themselves and complain the whole time about how they are only making $1.50 per hour, that's just too bad cry a river to someone that cares. It's no different than piece work for a welder.
I detassled corn one summer in about 1983. It paid $2 per hour, but since I was 12 years old, it was just fine. No adults, other than the farmer himself ever detassled corn that I am aware of and I am right in the middle of corn country.
The jobs that pay that are entry level, non skilled work that are perfect for kids that live at home. Those kids need to get out and learn about earning money and realize the amount of effort it takes to make a car payment and the insurance that goes with it as well as filiing the gas tank or pay a cell phone bill. As I already stated, if an able bodied adult has to resort to something like that, tough ****. Would you rather have them sit on their 30 year old *** in their moms basement playing video games and collecting welfare? I don't. If someone doesn't want to work, and there is nothing wrong with them other than they are lazy or "too good for those jobs", shoot them. They have nothing decent to provide.
This whole thing has derailed and has actually gotten to the point of being absurd, especially when the stupid horse stall example was given. It started out by a statement that manufacturing in America is pretty much dead, other than a few niche markets. Even if facilities could pay people a really good living wage AND turn a profit, Americans for the most part, wouldn't do it due to their entitlement. I know some would but most in the age group that would be needed wouldn't be willing to get their hands dirty. I worked for about eight months in a factory putting a nut on a bolt for combine heads all day long before I was hired by my first electrical contractor. If I remember right, I actually took a small pay cut when I switched from a job to a career. If factories went ahead and produced something that can be delivered from another country but cost even 25% more, for the most part, Americans in general wouldn't buy it. Prove me wrong.
And, what do you have to say about someone starting at the bottom, making minimum pay at first? Plumbers, carpenters, electrician, HVAC techs, none of them start off making anything close to decent money, but the only way to the top is by starting at the bottom. Mechanics do the schooling and some of them start off doing oil changes and tire repairs/replacements. Those don't pay very well either, but if someone wants the better job at the end of the tunnel, they have to put in their time at the bottom of the food chain. As I already stated, I started out at $7.50 per hour in 1994 and could barely make it. That is about the equivalent of $15 per hour now, I could do it if I was single, but it would be tough. It took four years, getting small raises along the way to get to where I was making decent money, but if I wasn't willing to work for $7.50 per hour then, I wouldn't be where I am now. If someone isn't willing to go to work doing the same thing now for $15 per hour, how in the blue hell are they going to wind up as a top of the pay scale journeyman?
This has gone beyond the factory wages and into a realm of stupidity. As long as we are there, how about you enlighten all of us as to why a high school aged kid that isn't involved in every sport imaginable, or a young 20 to 30 something adult that is living at mommy and daddies house won't get a job, even if it's a measly $15 per hour flipping burgers? It has nothing to do with working in a factory which is what the context was with the adder that Americans in general, don't want to do that type of work, no matter what the wages are.
And, if reading comprehension is above your level, you can go back to my posts and you can see that I didn't label an entire portion of anything. I said things like most, majority, etc. I know there are people that are willing to work, there just aren't very many of them.
Since you don’t seem to understand.
Jobs take a certain amount of skill and training,
even simple jobs.
Further, there are jobs that nay be simple, but which are unpleasant, like shoveling sh!t, or a lit of “manufacturing jobs”.
For a person to bother even trying to do either job, they want “something” at the end of the day.
Shoveling horse sh!t used to be an actual job people could make a career out of.
It was called being a horse Groom.
Shoveling sh!t (ie. Mucking a hirse stall) wasn’t the only task associated with being a horse groom, but it was probably one of the first “skills” someone who wanted to be a horse groom learned.
A lot of potential horse grooms probably started as kids mucking stalls, were earning a tiny amount probably wasn’t so bad.
The kids though were probably weak, and couldn’t shovel sh!t well till they hot older and stronger.
There were likely adults also shoveling the sh!t who got paid better and were more efficient, although the adilt sh!t shovelers probably weren’t paid well either.
The problem nowadays with jobs like shoveling horse sh!t, is that it’s not a job with much of a future, or much prospective for career advancement.
100 years ago, you could still probably walk a mile in a city and pass multiple stables.
If you needed extra money, and knew how to efficiently muck a stable, you could walk in to a bunch of stables on a 20 minute walk, and potentially get a job mucking stables to earn a bit of extra money in a pinch.
Even if the first stable didn’t need a sh!t shoveler, the second or third might.
With a work ethic, you could potentially shovel sh!t at multiple stables, earning a bit at each.
Nowadays, to properly muck a stable you need to know how, which is way less common, unless a person grew up riding horses.
The stables are likely way farther apart.
The work mucking stables is still messy, but streets aren’t covered in horse sh!t nowadays, so instead of just getting horse sh!t on shoes already covered in horse sh!t, you would be getting relatively clean shoes covered in horse sh!t.
If your pair of sneakers cost $50-$100, then you want at least that much at the end of the day to pay for a new pair of sneakers to replace the horse sh!t covered ones, and to do laundry.
If you do the job a few more times a week, you don’t need to buy new shoes, you just wear the sh!t covered ones.
When I came across the ad for horse stall mucking at $3-$4 a stall, the pay seemed like utter ****.
You would need to muck 25-35 stalls to pay for a new pair of sneakers.
I did run into a forum comment about $20-$25 a stall to muck.
At $20 a stall, you just need to clean 5 stalls to get a new pair of sneakers.
If you get the same work a few days each week, you don’t need to pay for new sneakers each day, you just wear the sh!t covered ones, and maybe your sh!t covered clothes.
At the end of the week, you actually have money in your pocket, and clean clothes and shoes.
The problem, is employers don’t want to train people to efficiently muck the horse stalls, knowledge that is necessary to do the job quickly, so the person getting covered in horse sh!t can actually make the job somewhat worthwhile money wise.
Instead, the person needing the horse sh!t shoveled just complains that nobody wants to work hard.
The reason shoveling horse sh!t has to do with manufacturing, is that both jobs have dangers, although in manufacturing it’s getting something cut or crushed by machinery, instead of being kicked in the head by a horse.
Both jobs can be messy, but in manufacturing it’s getting covered in oil or paint, instead of horse sh!t.
One of the fundamentals of older manufacturing was that you trained people at the job.
If you gad to hire someone who was already “skilled”, you had to pay the person more, and hoped the person brought extra knowledge, or that the persons work methods could be adapted to the factories manufacturing methods.
Nowadays employers were supposedly complaining that employees don’t know how to use a time clock, which is one of the fundamentals of managing a business.
You need to teach employees how you want the job done.
(For those thinking a time clock is “simple”, there are more than two dozen different models on Staples website, including ones that check fingerprints, or have facial ID, and that doesn’t even include all the other methods businesses might use for employee hours such as computer log ins, or time sheets)
